Transcript

About half a century ago, the French leader, Charles de Gaulle, exasperatedly said, "How can you govern a country that has 246 varieties of cheese?"

In fact, there are more than a thousand different types of cheese made around the world -- soft or hard, flavoured or blue; there are so many varieties.

I personally love Parmigano Reggiano -- possibly because it's a little umami bomb. But I'm not a one-cheese kinda guy - I love soft cheeses as well, like brie and camembert.

But now the hard cheddar is that we might have to rethink our daily cheese -- especially if we eat a lot of the stuff.

We have probably been making cheese from milk since we first domesticated sheep, about 10,000 years ago.

There's good evidence that cheeses were being made in Poland over 7,500 years ago. We've found actual strainers that were used to separate the liquid and solid components of fermented milk. The strainers have some milk fats still stuck in the holes!

We have also found actual preserved cheese in China that's around 3,700 years old. And in Greece, Homer's Odyssey (around 2,900 years ago) described how the Cyclops giant was making and storing cheese from his sheep and goats' milk.

So we humans and cheese go back a long way.

And no matter what kind of cheese we're talking, or when, they all start out the same way.

Milk is about 88% water, with the remaining 12% being mostly fat, protein and carbohydrate. If you curdle milk, say with acid or rennet, semisolid lumps of mostly fat and protein begin to appear. Separate these solids from the liquid and you are on your way to making cheese.

Today, the dairy industry is huge. Worldwide, we produce about 800 million tonnes of milk each year, and about 22 million tonnes of cheese.

In terms of global warming, worldwide the dairy industry's carbon footprint is roughly the same as the airline industry -- about 2 to 3 per cent of global carbon equivalent emissions! (Just to put this in perspective, the meat and livestock industry accounts for about 15 per cent of all global carbon equivalent emissions.)

There are many different ways to think about cheese and other foods like meat -- and these include health, ethical and environmental issues.

With regard to health, cheese has more salt than meat, and is higher in fat -- but they do seem to be good fats. And both milk and cheese are excellent sources of calcium.

From an environmental point of view, generating 1 kg of milk produces about 1.3 kg of carbon dioxide equivalent emissions.

But what about turning milk into cheese?

Well, as you work your way up from milk, through the soft cheeses to the hard cheeses, you need more milk to generate the same weight of cheese. So, in general, the harder the cheese, the more greenhouse emissions are given off.

Yoghurt, cottage cheese and cream cheese all generate a bit less than 2 kg of carbon dioxide equivalent per kilogram of final dairy product. But camembert (a soft cheese) takes around 7 to 8 kg of CO2 equivalent, while it takes 16 kg of carbon dioxide equivalent to generate just one kg of cheddar cheese in America from a Holstein-Friesian cow.

Averaging this out across all cheeses, it takes about 10 kg of carbon dioxide equivalent emissions to make 1 kg of cheese.

But generating a kilogram of beef produces significantly more greenhouse gas than that -- 26.5 kg of carbon dioxide equivalent.

So overall, cheese has a lower carbon footprint than meat.

From an ethical point of view, the news for cheese isn't great.

Milking cows have a short and overworked life. The life expectancy of a regular cow is around 20 years, but for a milking cow it's around 5 years.

Milking cows are separated from their mothers at birth, artificially inseminated at 18 months, and deliver their calf at 27 months. They are then on a continuous cycle of lactating and being artificially inseminated each year until they die at the age of five.

Of course, there are less stressful ways of getting milk from cows, but then you need more cows.

So like so many foods, cheese is a mixed bag when it comes to health, environmental and ethical considerations.

Now some vegetarians load up on cheese in their diet. But if you want to eat less meat, for whatever reason, think about your options.

Cheese can be a delicious part of your diet but probably shouldn't be your first choice as a meat substitute. There are many plant-based healthy protein options -- soy in its many varieties, as well as all the other legumes.

But if you're a cheese-lover like me, you don't have to have a meltdown.

After all, even the French, who are notorious for their love of cheese, eat only about 70 grams each day. Surely that's fair enough ...